PROJECT PLANNING, SCHEDULING, &

TIME MANAGEMENT
Video#1: How does a life of a Project Planner look like?

Video Summary:

A project Planner life starts with following major important things.

To – do list – to mark up the priority stuff to handle

Project meetings - weekly or scheduled meetings to communicate with team

Offsite visits to manufacturers - materials delivery is on time

Official Visits to site – if the work is going on as planned

Communication - planned stuff to convey with execution team

The Guy in video has shared a piece of advice that experience matters a lot than education – education is

that you study only but experience is something you learn practically and improve your technical skills,

communication skills.
 Planning Methodology Adopt in our Organization:

In our Organization, usually we do same procedure, but few things are important on which we focus:

 Communication in between Project Manager, Execution team, Resource Team, Project engineer, Customer

 Project planner plays an important role to keep an eye on budget too as his planning should be like in a way to

avoid cost overruns for major components of a project like market research for material arrangements, travel

arrangements, service charges of labor and agreed timeframe for completion of Project.

 Project planners works closely with end customer for requirements collections

 Project Planners are working closely to execution team and customer in real-time scenarios, to keep customer

updated about changes, delay, any issues to avoid any escalation.

 Critique/Suggestions:

In video, a thing we have observed is that,

• Project planner does not mention the budget or cost which is main factor for planning to

consider, if you plan a project without keeping in mind the budget of a project then it might be

possible that you face cost overruns.

• Requirement’s collection stuff is not mentioned who plays role for this part. As the project

planner in video only defines To Do list, weekly meetings, communication, offsite visits look

like an important role but missed two major things of triple constraints budget and scope.
Video #2:How does a life of project scheduler looks like:

In video, a thing we have observed is that:

 Daily Routine: Perform tasks according to schedule

 Meetings: Attend Schedule Meetings and Agenda in meetings

 Review To Do List: Review excel sheet and Monitor the progress

 Schedule Estimation: Estimation of effort and Estimation of hours

Characteristics Of Schedule Managers:

 Committed

 Punctuate

 Proactive Mind
Methodology used For Scheduling in Our organization :

 Agile Scrum Methodology

 Sprints

 Meetings

 Estimation of tasks

 Time Logging
Critique and Suggestions:

 Use of tool For meeting reminders

 Use of Project management tool to make effective project schedule

 Socially engagement with the team members

Summary of Article-Planning and Scheduling:

 Planning and Scheduling: The Yin and Yang of Managing a Project” is a paper on Project Management by

William Moylan

 It starts by highlighting the difference between planning & scheduling, but you need both to complete a

project

 Planning is the process of formulating the steps and procedures required to achieve the given objectives

 Scheduling is the process of turning this plan into workable timetables

 The paper then briefly explains the three parts of project planning: Scope of Work (SOW), Work

Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Critical Path Method (CPM)

 Scope of Work (SOW) is the key for the initial defining of a project

 The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) helps synthesize the project scope into a disciplined framework

 Critical Path Method (CPM) is an algorithm for planning, managing and analyzing the timing of a project.
The paper discusses the steps to get from the plan to a working schedule.

    Transforming the SOW into the WBS

Establishing project SOW, working the WBS & identifying the project tasks

   Determining requirements

This step addresses estimating task resource requirements and establishing task duration.

   Formulating the Schedule

A logical flow of the tasks is constructed, through which we arrive at the Network Logic Diagram (NLD).

Combining the NLD with the time duration of each task, we arrive at the CPM. Once the CPM has been

obtained, we can fine-tune the draft plan into an optimal schedule.

Critique /Suggestions:

 the “Formulating the Schedule” section was comparatively more dense and harder to understand

than the rest of the paper. This again gave the paper a disjointed look. Bullet points which had been

utilized in some of the previous sections should have been utilized again in this section, in order to

break down the calculations for CPM into easy-to-understand pieces

 Irrelevant analogies

 Cost Factor is missing to discuss whether the activities are planned as per Budget
 Thank you –
Queries are appreciated